Record of a Friendship

INTRODUCTION xii
he respected Neill's independence of mind and his honesty: "I know no
one in Europe who could listen better and understand better what is at
stake at the present time in the development of our work," and wrote
appreciatively of Neill's "unique position, being in the orgone fold but
at the same time independent."
During the 1950's, as the pressures on Reich increased, he became
mistrustful even of Neill, but it is a measure of his real affection that, as
late as 1956, the year before his death, he wrote to Neill: "It would be
splendid if you came to the U.S.A. this summer. You could stay at my
summer house as my guest. Though things have greatly changed since
1950, and much new has happened, I am certain we would get along."
But the ban still stood; Neill could not come.
Even had he been able to accept Reich's invitation, it is doubtful
whether, for all Neill's steady good sense and even-tempered realism, he
could have influenced the course of events that finally destroyed his
friend. Reich's passionate intransigence made him unable to accept
advice and left him perilously exposed to his enemies.
For a number of years after his move to the States, things had gone
well with Reich: he had remarried, had established the Orgone Institute
and the semi-independent Orgone Institute Press, which put out a
journal and published his books; he had acquired a beautiful tract of
land in Maine, intended as the future center of orgonomic research
and teaching; his practice flourished and he had attracted a con­
siderable following of student-physicians and supporters. Then, in 1947,
the hostility which, time and again throughout his life, his theories
had aroused came to the surface in America. An article by a freelance
reporter, Mildred Edie Brady, entitled "The Strange Case of Wilhelm
Reich," appeared in a respected periodical, The New Republic. Widely
quoted and repeated, this clever mixture of half truths, snide distortions,
and suggestive misrepresentations came to be accepted as fact by all
those who found Reich's views on the primacy of orgastic fulfillment
objectionable. Some righteous citizens alerted the Federal Food and
Drug Administration to the possibility of fraud in the claims which, the
article alleged, Reich had made for the orgone accumulator. From
then on, for ten years, the FDA pursued its investigation of Reich
with relentless zeal. Finally, in 1954, having failed to uncover the vice
ring for which the Orgone Institute was purportedly a front, the agency
succeeded in persuading the attorney general of the federal court in
Maine to issue a complaint against Reich and the Wilhelm Reich
Foundation, as a first step to banning the sale or rental of accumulators.